Obama Campaigns for Harris in Detroit, Criticizes Trump’s Immigration Record.
Former President Barack Obama campaigned for Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in Detroit on Tuesday. During the rally, he criticized her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, for not addressing immigration issues during his time in office.
Immigration is a key topic for voters in the upcoming 2024 election. The Biden-Harris administration faces strong criticism from Trump, who blames them for reversing his border policies and allowing record numbers of migrants to cross the southern border illegally.
At the rally, Obama acknowledged that “immigration is a real issue at our borders.” However, he defended Harris against accusations of neglecting illegal immigration during her four years as vice president. He described Trump’s promise to initiate “the largest mass deportation in the history of our country” as lacking substance.
“Wasn’t Donald Trump president for four years? Wasn’t he in charge before you? If rounding up and deporting millions of desperate people, many of them women and children, is the solution, why did the number of undocumented immigrants remain largely the same when he left office?” Obama asked.
He emphasized that when Trump took office, he did not solve the immigration problem.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
However, Obama’s assertion that the number of illegal immigrants “basically stayed the same” during Trump’s presidency is not accurate. In fact, the highest number of illegal border crossings occurred in 2019, with 851,508 apprehensions or inadmissible entries at the southern border, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This number dropped to 400,651 in 2020 after Trump used Title 42 to expedite deportations due to public health concerns related to COVID-19.
When President Biden took office in 2021, he quickly reversed many of Trump’s immigration policies. On his first day, Biden paused most ICE arrests and deportations from within the U.S., a move later blocked by a federal judge following a lawsuit from Texas. The Biden administration then prioritized deportations for national security threats, violent criminals, and recent border crossers, while halting construction of Trump’s border wall and ending the “Remain in Mexico” policy.
Illegal border crossings increased significantly, reaching 1.6 million in fiscal year 2021 and peaking at 2.2 million the following year, before slightly decreasing to just over 2 million in fiscal year 2023.
Recently, border crossings have declined sharply after Biden announced tighter immigration restrictions over the summer. An executive order now suspends migrant entry once a specific threshold is reached, leading to more than a 50% reduction in border encounters.
Looking ahead, Trump has pledged that if elected, he would deploy military troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and authorize ICE to conduct workplace raids to deport criminal illegal immigrants.
In contrast, Harris has not presented a specific immigration plan. Instead, she criticized Trump for undermining a bipartisan border security bill that failed to pass in the Senate. This bill aimed to increase funding for border agents, detention facilities, and fentanyl detection technology while imposing restrictions on U.S. entry during high border encounters.
Some conservatives opposed the legislation, arguing it would create a baseline for high illegal immigration rates, while some liberals objected to the emergency border authority it contained.
Harris has emphasized that any solution to illegal immigration must come from Congress. “I spoke with border agents recently, and they said we need more judges. We need to process cases faster and provide resources for prosecuting them. Ultimately, Congress is the only place where this can be fixed,” she stated last week.
Harris also highlighted efforts to support bipartisan initiatives, stating, “That border bill would have added 1,500 more border agents, which is why Border Patrol agents supported it. It would have helped stem the flow of fentanyl, which is a serious issue affecting everyone in our country. It would have provided more resources to prosecute transnational criminal organizations, which I worked on as the former attorney general of a border state.”
She criticized Trump for telling Congress to kill the bipartisan bill, asserting he preferred to campaign on problems rather than solve them.
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